Intel, Sony, Toshiba and Qualcomm are the stars -- or winners -- in iSuppli Corp.'s projected IC rankings for 2007. The losers: AMD, Freescale, among others. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc. are both projected to fall out of the top-10 rankings in terms of sales in 2007. (See charts below.)

Intel Corp., whose chip revenue is expected to rise 7.7 percent to reach $33.97 billion in 2007, will remain the world's largest IC maker in 2007, according to the projected rankings. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is projected to remain in second place in the rankings in terms of projectd IC sales for 2007, according to the research firm. Toshiba Corp. is expected to take third place, jumping over Texas Instruments Inc., who will be in fourth in the projected rankings for 2007, according to the firm. Rounding out the top-10, STMicroelectronics will be in fifth, followed by Hynix, Renesas, Sony, NXP and Infineon, according to the firm.

Sony Corp. and Infineon Technologies AG made their way to the top-10. Sony was in 14th place in 2006, while Infineon was in 15th.

Sony is still in limbo, however. Sony's revenue increase is nearly all due to its sales of chips for the company's PlayStation 3 video-game console, according to iSuppli. Company semiconductor revenue increased to $8 billion in 2007, up from $5.1 billion in 2006, they said. Sony has announced a deal to transfer production of its Cell microprocessor for the PlayStation 3 to Toshiba. If this deal closes before the end of the year, Sony's chip revenue in 2007 in this area will be transferred to Toshiba, based on iSuppli's methodology. Under these circumstances, Toshiba would increase its distance from TI's as the world's No. 3 semiconductor supplier, while Sony would drop out the Top-10 rankings, according to iSuppli.

Meanwhile, Infineon is set to achieve a 14.6 percent increase in semiconductor revenue CY 2007, much of this increase is due to a rise in wireless communications semiconductor sales, they said.

Another star, Qualcomm Inc., is expected to post the third largest increase in revenue among the top-20 semiconductor suppliers in 2007, rising by 23.7 percent to reach $5.6 billion, up from $4.5 billion in CY 2006. This will put Qualcomm into the market's 12th ranking in 2007, up from 16th in 2006. Qualcomm's increase is entirely due to a surge in sales of semiconductors for mobile handsets and infrastructure, the firm said.

Going in the opposite direction, Freescale Semiconductor is set for a 10.7 percent decline in chip sales for 2007. This is primarily due to weakness at Freescale's largest customer, Motorola Inc., which has been losing market share to Nokia and Samsung in mobile handset sales in 2007, according to iSuppli.

And at the same time, Intel outperformed its PC microprocessor rival, AMD, whose sales are expected to decline by 22.7 percent for the year. "Throughout most of the year, Intel successfully defended much of the market share that it won from AMD in the first quarter in the PC microprocessor segment due to the success of its lines of dual- and quad-core chips," said Dale Ford, vice president, market intelligence for iSuppli, in a statement.

"This represents a major reversal of fortune compared to 2006, when AMD had the advantage with its popular dual-core microprocessors, allowing it to gain share from Intel," he said.

Although you may not be familiar with YelloMosquito, chances are you're totally aware of the business that 22Moo is in. Turns out, the former is simply a division of the latter, which is busy boasting about the Qingbar Gp300. 'Course, we've known that completely wireless head-mounted displays were in the works, but YM is claiming that these unsightly things are the world's first cordless LCOS video glasses to feature a built-in media player complete with DivX support. Reportedly, users can enjoy getting mocked while watching a 50-inch virtual screen, and they can load up their files via the built-in miniSD slot. If you just can't resist the urge to relive your Virtual Boy glory days, you can pre-order the December-bound unit now for $299 -- otherwise, you'll be laying down a Benjamin more (or smartly saving a mint) wh! en it ships en masse.

Identifying strong market potential in Vietnam, European chipmaker STMicroelectronics NV has opened a representative office in Hanoi, according to local newspapers <i>Viet Nam News</i> and <i>Thanh Nien Daily</i>.

U.S. stocks retreated sharply on news corporate earnings sagged during the third quarter, dropping to its lowest level in years and sparking fears the economy could slide into a recession as corporations cut back on capital expenditure.

Three Intel researchers Robert Chau, Kaizad Mistry and Tahir Ghani, who were part of the team behind the 45nm high-k metal gate success, talk about the highs and lows of the project and what motivated them to press on and move on to more challenging endeavors.

Your next co-op job is with the Independent Eagle-Eyed Elective, a consulting firm that performs code reviews for other companies. Your first task is to review the VHDL code for a new traffic-light controller that has been written by Valerie Hazelton and David Langsdorf.

NOTES:
1. The traffic-light controller is designed for conventional intersections of two roads, with green, yellow, and red lights facing each of the four directions. There are no turn signals or blinking green lights.
2. Valerie and David have checked that their code is legal and synthesizable.
3. Val and Dave have not yet simulated or verified their code.
4. Each of the four directions (North, South, East, and West) has a traffic light.
5. The North and South facing lights are both controlled by the NS light output of the controller.
6. The East and West facing lights are both controlled by the EW light output of the controller.
7. Each of the four direction has a car sensor (e.g. N car) to detect when a car is waiting for the light to turn green.

Identify three changes that VH and DL should make to their code that will have the largest impact in improving the controller (e.g. optimizations or bug fixes). For each change:

NOTES:
1. Identify the lines of code or signals affected by the change
2. Describe the change
3. Justify the importance of the change in terms of its impact on the controller

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Some software programming languages allow compilers to perform "short cut" or "short circuit" optimizations on AND and OR operations. In a short-cut AND or OR, the second argument is not evaluated if the first argument evaluates to a controlling value. For example, in evaluating f(x) AND g(y), if f(x) is false, then g(y) will not be evaluted.

Answer whether this optimization is feasible and beneficial in hardware.

Solution:
This optimization is neither feasible nor beneficial for hardware.
Hardware executes in parallel (concurrently) and software executes sequentially (serially). In hardware, we already have the circuitry to evaluate both sides of an operand. It would require more circuitry and incur greater delay to control the evaluation of the second operand than to just use the result of the second operand.

Extra notes:

f(x) and g(y) take multiple cycles to execute and each is executed on separate hardware, then we can execute both f(x) and g(y) at the same time and perform the short-cut optimization if the first operation to complete execution results in a controlling value.

If f(x) and g(y) take multiple clock cycles to execute and are executed on the same hardware, then the short-cut optimization is feasible and beneficial.

Poor justification: Confusing “short-circuiting” as software jargon with short circuiting in the
hardware world.

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The following graph plots the voltage transfer characteristic for a device with one input and one output. Can this device be used as a combinational device in a logic family with 0.75V noise margins?

You are designing a new logic family and trying to decide on values of the four parameters VIL, VOL, VIH, VOH that lead to non-zero noise margins for various possible inverter designs. Four proposed inverter designs exhibit the voltage transfer characteristics shown in the diagrams below. For each design, either (1) specify suitable values of VIL, VOL, VIH, VOH. or (2) explain why no values for these parameters satisfy the static discipline.

The behavior of a 1-input, 1-output device is measured by hooking a voltage source to its input and measuring the voltage at the output for several different input voltages:

We're interested in whether this device can serve as a legal combinational device that obeys the static discipline. For this device, obeying the static discipline means that

if VIN <= VIL then VOUT >= VOH, and
if VIN >= VIH then VOUT <= VOL.

Can one chose a VOL of 0V for this device? Explain.

What's the smallest VOL one can choose and still have the device obey the static discipline? Explain.

Assuming that we want to have 0.5V noise margins for both "0" and "1" values, what are appropriate voltage levels for VOL, VIL, VIH, and VOH so that the device obeys the static discipline. Hint: there are many possible choices, just choose one that obeys the constraints listed above.

Assuming that we want to have 0.5V noise margins for both "0" and "1" values, what is the largest possible voltage level for VOL that still results in a device that obeys the static discipline?

Assuming that we want to have equal noise margins for both "0" and "1" values, what is the largest noise margin we can achieve with this device and still obey the static discipline?

The e language enjoys popular use in the ASIC/VLSI industry for creating spec's, modeling, testing and verification of hardware systems.

Features of e include a combination of object oriented and constraint oriented mechanisms for the specification of data formats and interdependencies, interesting mechanisms of inheritance, and an efficient combination of interpreted and compiled code. Since the language is also extensible it serves as a living, industrial scale, implementation and application of the aspect oriented programming paradigm.

During the course of the following tryst with the e language we will cover the language highlights, its novel features and their particular suitability to the task of hardware verification, and reports on our experience of aspect oriented programming in this intense commercial setting. Objects have been a great success at facilitating the separation of concerns, but objects are limited in their ability to modularize systemic concerns that are not localized to a single module's boundaries. Rather than staying well, localized within a class, these concerns tend to crosscut the system's class and module structure. Much of the complexity and brittleness in existing systems appears to stem from the way in which the implementation of these kinds of concerns comes to be intertwined throughout the code.

We observed that while object oriented techniques have given the programmer excellent data abstraction mechanisms, objects themselves are cumbersome when it comes to expressing aspects of behavior that affect several data types. Conversely, OOP fails in naturally facilitating non-invasive extension mechanisms for layering new functionality over existing code.

A typical verification problem: A functional verification program consists of a more or less detailed description of the functionality of a device, its operating environment, and the data transformations it performs. In general terms functional verification is predicated on the assumption that a detailed simulation model of a device has been implemented in a suitable hardware description language. Such descriptions are simulated in software or emulated in configurable hardware for the purpose of determining the precise timing properties of the design, as well as to judge its functional correctness. Given such an implementation of the device under test (DUT) a suitable testbench needs to be erected around the DUT in order to subject it to a large number of tests.

Instructions: A key element in any verification environment is an adequate description of the data being manipulated—CPU instructions, in this case. Such descriptions typically do form natural classes of structured data—thus CPU instructions will be defined by some common elements such as opcode and addressing mode, but differences emerge (say) in the operands present causing a classification into immediate (e.g., the second operand, op2, is a two byte integer constant), memory (op2 is a two byte memory address), and register instructions (op2 is a four bit register index).

Test Generator: This software ultimately creates a sequence of test vectors (of bits) to stimulate the DUT whether on-the-fly, or as a prelude to running a test. Setting aside the question of how to (randomly) generate instances of the data classes involved, the test generator needs to determine what are legal inputs, and what are not. To some extent a strong type system helps define legal ranges—it is easy then to generate a random four bit value for op2 in the register class. However via types it is difficult to stipulate, for example, that since register zero never holds a branch address an indexed branch instruction cannot have op2 equal to zero. Constraints, in the form of Boolean relationships over the fields of class definitions, contribute the necessary flexibility, relieving the programmer (or test writer) of much unnecessary programming.

Reference model: Commonly, but not necessarily, a reference model will be used to predict correct responses from the DUT for each datum input during a test. Typically functional verification works at the level of whole transactions rather than clock cycles of the DUT—in this case a transaction is initiated by injecting an instruction into the running simulation, and terminated some time later by observing a result on one of the device’s output channels. Reference models thus do not need to be cycle accurate specifications of the hardware, just functionally accurate.

Checker: The testbench must obviously check the expected results of the test against the actual computation. In CPU verifications there are typically two types of checker: a data checker that ensures that all instructions computed the correct results, and a temporal checker that monitors how each instruction is executed by the DUT. This latter activity calls for the definition of behavioral rules (e.g., via executable temporal logic, or finite automata) that are run concurrently with the DUT, monitoring its state and progress.

Coverage: Metrics that help the verification engineer decide how well the verification is progressing have to be carefully designed with reference to a test plan. For instance it may be required to test that the CPU responded correctly to an interrupt when a branch instruction was being decoded. The ‘responds correctly’ may be a temporal rule invoked under such circumstances, but the fact that this scenario occurred during testing would be entered as a functional coverage point. In a simple case one might be content to count how many times this combination of circumstances occurred.

Given a functional verification environment such as that envisaged above, tests will be devised to exercise the design. Sometimes these need to be very deterministic (e.g., in the early phases of the verification effort when one is testing basic functionality), but better coverage of the state space is achieved through random testing, especially when the ‘randomness’ can be directed towards particular goals. Often such goals are expressed as corner cases, particularly where functions of the device interact with one another. Principally it is for this purpose that the e language has been developed: random, directed test generation.

Factors influencing e's design: Since its initial conception in the early nineties the e language has evolved to meet the needs of functional verification engineers. e is used to describe the DUT, its operating environment, its legal inputs, and its behavior over time. Specman, Verisity’s flagship product implementing the language and runtime system, takes such a description and uses it to generate test inputs and drive them into the DUT, carry out temporal and data checking by monitoring the device, create coverage reports, and assist in debugging. Even though e is a general-purpose programming language (in fact most of Specman is written in e) its design has been geared towards the task of modeling and verifying hardware systems. This specific task imposed a number of important characteristics on the language.

Specialized Lingual Constructs: These include constraints, for example, which provide an effective declarative mechanism for the specification of configurations and for guiding test generation, and temporal properties (also declarative) which are used to describe time based phenomena. Inevitably there are many hardware oriented primitive types and operators on them such as bit-access and bit-slicing (common HDL functions), as well as mechanisms for specifying parallel execution.

Simplified textual syntax:The rich toolset that e provides to its user must be served in an easy to use, non-cryptic syntax. The design of the syntax and the semantics were also influenced by the reality that the principal users of the language are not software specialists but mainly hardware engineers who, in particular, may not be schooled in object oriented languages.

Performance: The verification of hardware systems by means of simulation is, almost by definition, a slow process. Every hardware cycle in which many operations may take place in parallel is translated to a sequence of slow software steps. In addition, the quality of a verification process is highly dependent on its coverage level. Even a non-exhaustive verification process may execute for months on dedicated powerful servers. This is the reason why e has a very efficient implementation; typically, an instruction (such as field access or function call) in e is implemented in a similar manner to the equivalent instruction in C.

Compiled and interpreted code: For reasons that are discussed in subsequent Sections below, there is a need when building testbenches to be able to load files which add new features, constructs, and especially constraints,on top of an extant code base. There is also a need for mixing those independently constructed additions in an unrestricted way.

On the face of it e is a lexically scoped, statically type checked object-oriented language with single inheritance. A struct in e, just like a class in other programming languages, may declare fields and methods. Structs may also contain several unique declarative components, including constraints (affecting initial values assigned to fields), event definitions (for monitoring DUT behaviour), and temporal properties (checking protocols, etc.). The temporal and concurrent features of e are not discussed further here.

A simple example, drawn from a verification environment for a packet switching device, demonstrates how constraints are used in e.

The first of these two statements declares an enumerated type, the second declares a structured object with several scalar fields. The keeps are constraints that affect initial values assigned to the fields mentioned whenever an instance of this class is created—Specman resolves such constraints during a test run in order to generate a random, directed stream of data for the DUT. Constraints in e are linear functions over finite domains.

While the synthesis of constraint solving and object oriented programming in e is an interesting subject in itself, it is not explored further in this article which rather focuses on the language constructs that address separation of concerns. Thus, in addition to the simple inheritance mechanism (which is called like inheritance in e), the language provides a unique and powerful when inheritance mechanism. Moreover, any e struct can be extended in a later module: fields, methods, events, and constraints can be added to it, and method definitions can be modified or overridden. Interpreted files can be loaded on top of a compiled executable, possibly extending already-compiled structs. The extension capabilities are discussed in Sections below, the when inheritance mechanism is also deferred until subsequent Sections.

Over the weekend Intel launched its long-awaited new 'Penryn' line of power-efficient microprocessors, designed to deliver better graphics and application performance as well as virtualization capabilities. The processors are the first to use high-k metal-gate transistors, which makes them faster and less leaky compared with earlier processors that have silicon gates. The processor is lead free and by next year Intel is planning to produce chips that are halogen free, making them more environmentally friendly. Penryn processors jump to higher clock rates and feature cache and design improvements that boost the processors' performance compared with earlier 65-nm processors, which should attract the interest of business workstation users and gamers looking for improved system and media performance.

The organization Scholastic Lecture Expert Productivity Testers (SLEPT), has defined a standardized algorithm to compress digital-video lectures by removing irrelevant material. The company you work for, Yawn Inc, is developing a circuit that implements this compression algorithm. A competing company, Snore Co, has just released their own circuit that also implements the standardized algorithm.

SLEPT has established a benchmark of five lectures to use for comparing circuits that implement the compression algorithm.
The CEO of your company, Dr. Owsy has asked you to calculate the price at which you should sell the Yawn circuit such that you can advertise to consumers that the price/performance ratio for the Yawn circuit is 10% better than the Snore circuit.

You evaluate a Yawn circuit and a Snore circuit in your lab, and gather the following data. Unfortunately, you fall asleep on the backspace button, deleting the information for the length of lectures after compression for the Yawn circuit.

Assuming that the selling price of Snore Co’s circuit is $150, compute the selling price for the Yawn circuit that would make its price/performance ratio 10% better than the Snore circuit. If you do not have enough information to calculate the selling price: explain how you could obtain the missing information and show your equation that uses the missing information to calculate the selling price.

Solution:

Performance is work/time. The work that the circuit does is to compress lecures. The SLEPT algorithm is standardized. All circuits that implement the algorithm will produce the same results (e.g. same amount of compression). Hence, all circuits do the same amount of work.The time taken to do the work is the “Execution time for circuit”. Because we have a benchmark, the execution time to compare is the time to run the benchmark, that is, compress the five lectures in the benchmark.

A better price/performance ratio means that the price is lower or the performance is greater: the lower the ratio the better the ratio.

Starting with the formula for “a is n% more than b”: we get the following

For the following question, you only need to give the relevant VHDL code fragment (i.e. process that drives the flop). You may assume that any signals you need or want to use are defined appropriately. Use obvious labels like d, q, cs select, reset, etc.

Give a VHDL code fragment to implement a standard D flip-flop.

Give a VHDL code fragment to implement a flip-flop with a multiplexer on its input (assume two inputs: a and b).

Give a VHDL code fragment to implement a flip-flop with a chip select line and an asynchronous reset.

Sol 1:

process(clk)
begin
if rising_edge(clk) then
q <= d;
end if;
end process;

The average performance of products in your market segment triples every 36 months. Your design engineers have proposed an optimization that will increase performance by 12%. The optimization will postpone the completion date of the project by 2 months. Should the engineers implement the optimization and postpone the completion date, or should they stick to the original schedule?

Your group designs a microprocessor for use in cell phones and palmtop computers. You currently fabricate your chips on a 0.25micron process. A new fabrication facility with a 0.13micron process has asked you if you would like to switch to their facility. What do you believe will be the three most important tradeoffs between remaining with the 0.25 micron fabrication process and switching to the 0.13 micron process?

Explain derating factor

Possible solutions:

The average performance in the market segment will increase by 6.3%. Design engineers will increase performance by 12%, which is more than the competition will increase in performance. So, the engineers should complete the optimization and postpone the completion date.

The three points

smaller feature size will likely increase leakage power

smaller feature size will decrease area, thereby decreasing cost

new facility may have manufacturing problems

Derating factors give factors for predicting the maximum clock speed of a circuit as supply voltage, temperature, and other environmental factors change. In the formula below, F is the maximum clock speed and V is the supply voltage. As the supply voltage increases, the maximum clock speed also increases.

The new vice president of your company has set up a contest for ideas to reduce leakage power in the next generation of chips that the company fabricates. The prize for the person who submits the suggestion that makes the best tradeoff between leakage power and other design goals is to have a door installed on their cube. What is your door-winning idea, and what tradeoffs will your idea require in order to achieve the reduction in leakage power?

You're on the functional validation team for a chip that will control a simple portable CD-player. Your task is to create a plan for the functional validation for the signals in the entity cd digital. You've been told that the player behaves "just like all of the other CD players out there". If your test plan requires knowledge about any potential non-standard features or behaviour, you'll need to document your assumptions.

Describe five tests that you would run as soon as the VHDL code is simulatable. For each test: describe what your specification, stimulus, and check. Summarize the why your collection of tests should be the first tests that are run.

Describe five corner-cases or boundary conditions, and explain the role of corner cases and boundary conditions in functional validation.

Possible Solutions in order:

Increase transistor size so as to increase threshold voltage. This will require an increase in supply voltage, which will likely increase total power.